Brave New World: Desktop Publishing

With the appearance of the first Apple^® desktop units, computers were no longer quite so foreign and mysterious to The Rest of Us. In 1985, the advent of pagelayout programs such as Ready, Set, Go!^® and Aldus PageMaker^® made the computer a replacement for X-Acto knives and hot wax applicators.

Adobe's PostScript^® page-description language brought laser printers to life and turned them into viable output devices for camera-ready art. Soon, what had been the sole province of specialized craftsmen became a public playing field. The good news? Anyone with a computer, a page-layout program, and an Apple LaserWriter^® could now do much of the work involved in publishing. Tasks that had traditionally been performed in trade shops were accomplished by desktop computer users. Page-layout applications began to replace the separate jobs of setting type, creating mechanicals, and stripping film. Adobe Photoshop became the most widespread tool for retouching and color correction, seriously eroding the market for the million-dollar, high-end CEPS. New desktop publishers leapfrogged the former apprentice-to-journeyman training of printing craftsmen, and hit the ground running. And while the speed of electronic systems accelerated the pace in the industry and redistributed the tasks, it also redistributed the responsibilities. The distribution of labor began to look more like Table 1.1.

Table 1.1. Desktop publishing's redistribution of graphic arts tasks. Traditional tradeshop tasks like retouching, for example, might be done by a designer, a photographer, or the printer.

For example, in the Old Way, designers might indicate color break what color is used in each element of the pagebut it was usually up to the prep workers in the color trade shop to cut masks to accomplish this, in a process called mechanical color. But now color break is part of a page layout or illustration. Designers have a finished product ready to print when it leaves their hands, rather than a guide for someone else's work.